Locarno Director: 'Era of Algorithms' Adventurous Lineup

The artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival used his pre-event press conference today to unveil a program he described as deliberately bold and risk-taking, one that confronts what he called the “era of algorithms” head-on while placing the idea of human community at its thematic core.

Speaking to journalists ahead of the 79th edition of the Swiss festival, set to run in August, the director framed this year’s selection as a conscious countermeasure to the data-driven, homogenizing forces reshaping film culture. He rejected the notion that streaming metrics and audience-optimization tools should dictate cinematic ambition, arguing instead that festivals have an obligation to champion work that resists easy categorization.

“We are living through an era of algorithms,” the director said. “Our lineup is deliberately adventurous - maybe even provocative - because we believe the cinema that matters most is the cinema that cannot be predicted by a machine. That kind of cinema demands real audiences, real encounters, real communities.”

The program, which includes more than 30 world premieres spread across the main competition, the “Concorso internazionale” section, and parallel strands, draws heavily from first-time feature directors as well as seasoned auteurs returning with formally experimental works. Titles remain fully embargoed until next week, but the director did note that several films employ non-professional casts, radical structural devices, or location-specific production methods that resist easy consumption on a laptop screen.

The Algorithmic Pushback

The director’s remarks arrive at a moment of intense debate across the international festival circuit about the role of curation in an increasingly algorithm-driven industry. Several major festivals have faced criticism in recent years for selecting films that feel tailor-made for streaming platforms, with polished narratives and clear three-act structures that test well with focus groups.

“An algorithm can tell you what people have watched before,” the director said. “It cannot tell you what they might love if they were only given the chance to discover something unfamiliar. That gap - between the known and the possible - is where a festival like ours has to live.”

He pointed specifically to a strand titled “The Currents of Tomorrow,” which will feature eight features and six short films that explicitly deconstruct narrative conventions. One film in this section, shot entirely in a single continuous take inside a moving train, relies on improvisation between actors who had never met before production began. Another uses no dialogue at all, communicating only through sound design and environmental textures.

“These are not easy films,” the director acknowledged. “They demand patience, attention, a willingness to surrender control. But that surrender is exactly what we are trying to protect - the idea that cinema can still surprise us, can still make us feel something we did not know we needed to feel.”

Community as Cure

Running as a through-line across the entire program is what the director described as a sustained meditation on the nature of community, especially in a time when digital platforms have simultaneously connected and isolated populations.

He noted that several competition entries examine how small groups form, maintain, and sometimes fracture under pressure. One film follows a fishing village in Portugal grappling with the arrival of a tech billionaire who wants to turn the harbor into a private marina. Another shadows a women’s choir in rural Japan as its members confront age, illness, and the slow dissolution of their gathering place.

“Community is not nostalgia,” the director said. “It is not a return to some idealized past. It is a practice - a difficult, ongoing, fragile practice. The films we are presenting do not sentimentalize community. They show how hard it is to build, how easily it can break, why we keep trying anyway.”

The festival will also screen a restored 35mm print of John Cassavetes’ Faces from 1968 as part of a sidebar titled “The Room Where It Happens,” which pairs classic explorations of group dynamics with contemporary responses. That sidebar, the director noted, is meant to physically gather audiences in Locarno’s Piazza Grande - the largest open-air cinema in Europe - to reinforce the embodied experience of watching together.

“You cannot algorithmically replicate the sensation of being in that square at midnight, with a thousand strangers breathing in the same frame,” the director said. “That is the original community of cinema. We are trying to remind people why it still matters.”

The full program is scheduled for release on August 8, with tickets going on sale shortly thereafter. Industry observers will be watching closely to see whether Locarno’s “adventurous” bet pays off in both critical reception and audience turnout - a test, perhaps, of whether there is still appetite for the kind of cinema that refuses to be optimized.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter